Digital Humanities

I began my DH work in a Mellon Foundation-supported “Graduate Concentration in the Digital Humanities” at Yale (2015-16), where I received introductory training in text analysis, topic modeling, network visualization, GIS, and other tools and methods. This year-long seminar, organized around the theme “(En)Visualizing Knowledge,” focused on DH scholarship engaging explicitly with questions of race, gender, sexuality, and equity. I’ve also participated in a Folger Shakespeare Institute seminar on text analysis, organized by the Visualizing English Print project, as well as a week-long course on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) run by the Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching program (HILT 2017).

I recently discussed the rich intersections between DH and book history with Whitney Trettien (Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania) and Catherine DeRose (Manager, Yale Digital Humanities Laboratory) for the Yale Program in the History of the Book (30 January 2019). A recording of the panel can be found here.

I was selected as a DH Teaching Fellow by the Yale Digital Humanities Lab as an instructor for the literature survey course “Vampires, Castles, & Werewolves” (Spring 2017). Here, I designed a series of assignments in which students used digital tools to explore Gothic texts from The Castle of Otranto to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. These tasks integrated a focus on close reading and argumentative writing with DH techniques like distant reading, textual analysis, and curation. In one assignment, students collaborated to create a public, digital exhibit featuring the major concepts of horror literature.

Part of an open-source digital exhibit created by students using Omeka (Spring 2017)

As a graduate organizer for the Yale Program in the History of the Book, I helped design and run “Inevitabilities of the Book” (Sept. 2016): a two-day symposium in which book historians and DH scholars considered the scroll, the codex, and their many offshoots as technologies and cultural objects.

I’ve just concluded the early stages of an ongoing project which uses DH tools to map the cultural significance of water and waste management in early modern London. This research has been presented at the conferences of the Renaissance Society of America (2017) and HASTAC (2015)—see my Presentations page for more. I’m also a former co-convener (2015-17) and current member of Yale’s Digital Humanities Working Group.